Analysis

How do data-center-dependent companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook reduce their power bill and — if they’re environmentally conscious — their carbon footprint? Though focusing on cooling costs and measuring power usage effectiveness (PUE) are the most common measures, the server itself could be designed to use less power.

With that possibility now looming, a number of players are jumping in, from startups trying to engineer power-efficient fabrics to established chip makers like Intel that are working on lower-power processors. The race is on to see if data-center hardware can be cost-effectively implemented with a residual lowering of overall power use.